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XXXIII CONFERENZA ITALIANA DI SCIENZE REGIONALI

INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS AND THE CITY: RELATIONSHIPS IN THE KNOWLEDGE

AGE. EVIDENCE FROM THE ITALIAN CASE

Fabiano COMPAGNUCCI1, Augusto CUSINATO

1

ABSTRACT

The spatial implications of fordist and district-based patterns of development have had a pro-

found effect on the debate about the role of the city. While the city is reputed to be the crucial

provider of externalities within the fordist model, its role seems more disputable when the dis-

trict model prevails. This disregard is probably due to (a) the fact that the revival of the debate

on industrial districts has placed strong emphasis on the agglomeration economies internal to

the districts themselves, when not emphasising the burden of urban diseconomies; and (b) the

countryside roots of most district pioneers. The quarrel was further fuelled with the advent of

ICTs, and the feasibility of displacing productive phases at a global level. The paper argues

that this is only the early part of the history. The advent of ICTs has also had an important

impact on the internal organisation of firms and on economic geography as a whole. It has

also made knowledge and innovation the crucial drivers of the competitiveness of firms and

local economic systems. The praxis of learning internal to firms has profoundly changed too.

According to this view, the main hypothesis of the paper is that the city has become a crucial

socio-spatial device for knowledge generation. The paper investigates this issue by introduc-

ing a new analytical category − ‘Knowledge-creating services (KCS)’. With reference to the

Italian case, the outcomes corroborate the above hypothesis and open an original perspective

on the relationships between the city and IDs in the knowledge age: the city is shown to be

not only the gateway for functionally connecting IDs with the global market but also a genu-

ine ‘Knowledge-creating District’.

1 Università Iuav di Venezia, Department of Design and Planning in Complex Environmensts, S. Croce, 1957,

30135 Venezia, e-mail: fabianoc@iuav.it; augusto.cusinato@iuav.it.

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1 Introduction2

While industrial clusters of SMEs are objectively discernible entities, it is highly disputable

that the neo-marshallian industrial districts (IDs) can be similarly defined. Their distinguish-

ing features within the more general class of industrial clusters are (a) the fact that the firms

are integrated within the same industry or phase (which can be objectively observable) and (b)

the presence of a place-specific social capital (which is not, by contrast, objectively observ-

able) thanks to which the ID enjoys a competitive advantage with respect to the big company

and the generic industrial cluster. These peculiarities are summarised by Becattini’s well-

known definition, according to which an ID is “a socio-territorial entity which is characterised

by the active presence of both a community of people and a population of firms in one natu-

rally and historically bounded area. In the district – and unlike in other environments, such as

the manufacturing town – the community and the firms tend, as it were, to merge” (Becattini,

2004, p. 19; emphasis added). Becattini himself argues that the presence of such a merging

can be only inferred by having recourse to indicators such as: (a) the functioning of conven-

tional prices within the ID, (b) entrepreneurs’ self-limitation in avoiding extreme “Schum-

peterian” actions against local competitors; (c) the recourse to joint actions to improve recip-

rocal competitiveness in the external market (Becattini, 2000) and, we add, (d) the practice of

deliberately leaving a margin of indeterminacy in defining the terms of the reciprocal com-

mitments in local transactions.

In a world where the apparently endless development and pervasiveness of market capitalism

seem to impose increasing formalisation of any economic relationship, the ID phenomenon

could prove that another route to development is possible, one which makes it possible to

combine the richness of moral-based relationships and the requirements for impersonality of

market competitiveness. Again according to Becattini’s definition, the achievement of such a

condition entails a socio-spatial divide, between an inner space − the ID “socio-territorial en-

tity” − within which the recourse to the moral economy as well as market practices is possible

and also socially encouraged, and an outer space − the “other environments” − which is ruled

by the harsh imperatives of market, and which the ID has necessarily to relate to. This dual

structure is not new at all, and actually relates to an archetype which is usually found in the

presence of communitarian forms of social integration that are in contact with “other” com-

munities: “You may charge a foreigner interest, but you may not charge your brother interest,

that the LORD your God may bless you in all that you undertake in the land that you are en-

tering to take possession of it” (Deuteronomy, 23:20, English Standard Version, 2001).

Against this background, the theoretical frame underlying the notion of ID seems to be an up-

2 The paper was firstly published in: Università Politecnica delle Marche, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche

e Sociali, Working Papers No 365, 2011. Available at http://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:anc:wpaper:365.

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dating of that archetypal figure to the industrial age, on the assumption that isles of commu-

nity still exist within the market system. As known, these isles have been identified by the

pioneers of the neo-marshallian approach with those parts of the North-Eastern and Central

(NEC) Italian countryside where endogenous processes of handicraft and small enterprise de-

velopment were taking place in the late sixties and seventies (Bagnasco, 1977, 2003; Brusco,

1989), often thanks to the initiative of sharecroppers, who had long experienced the contact

with the market and the city (Cusinato, Cecchetto, 2003).

Figure 1 depicts the topological structure of that system, comprising a community-based ID

(or system of IDs) which is tucked into a market environment, with which it relates. Whilst

the economic relationships internal to the ID are ruled according to a mix of moral and market

rules, external relationships, be they with the generic world market or with the “manufactur-

ing town”, operate according to market rules. It follows that there is no structural difference

between the city and the rest of the external space because both share the condition of being

industry-based within a capitalistic system: if there is a difference, it is that the city is the piv-

otal and driving device of that system.

The inner space to the ID:

a community of peopleand a population of firmsstructured according to a

mix of moral and market rules

Market exchanges

The outer space:

the industrialised society

structured according to market rules

Market and non-market

economic exchanges

The “manufacturing town” Market

exchangesMarket

exchanges

Figure 1 - The topological structure of the original neo-marshallian ID

Such a scheme entails competition between the newly-industrialised countryside and the in-

dustrial city, but, unlike the classical representation, according to which the former lies in a

condition of dependency, this time the parties are reversed or at least balanced. Thanks to the

common communitarian roots and the spatial proximity of the emerging local key players (en-

trepreneurs, workers, opinion leaders and politicians), the countryside now enjoys specific

advantages in both the economic and the social domain, in contrast with the disadvantage it

previously suffered because of the spatial dispersion of peasants (as Adam Smith noted).

Without questioning whether this representation is really consistent with the conditions occur-

ring during the rise of the Third Italy, it seems expedient to examine if it fits with the present

condition, which is characterised by the de-industrialisation of cities, the de-materialisation of

many crucial assets, the globalisation of markets, and the rise of what is increasingly labelled

as the ‘knowledge economy’.

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Responses will be achieved by first examining the peculiarities of the knowledge economy

with respect to the fordist economy, as well as the role the city plays within this new techno-

economic paradigm (Section 2). The story of the relationships between IDs and the city is

subsequently revisited (Section 3) and a geography of the knowledge economy is sketched

with reference to the Italian case (Section 4). Within this geography, the city clearly appears

to be functionally and spatially complementary to the IDs, not only as the gateway to the

global market, but also to knowledge-creating activities. In the final section, this complemen-

tarity is examined, bearing in mind that mismatches in knowledge-creating competences can

severely hinder the establishment of synergies between these two pivotal realities of the pre-

sent Italian economic system.

2 The city in the knowledge economy

2.1 About knowledge

Knowledge can be broadly defined as the system of plausible beliefs the subjects have about

reality while being aware that, precisely because it is a matter of belief, there is a certain de-

gree of approximation between the mental images they form and the reality itself. The key

epistemological issue therefore is (and has always been) how to assess that degree of ap-

proximation. In contemporary western thought, two main epistemologies compete with regard

to this point, the ontological and the hermeneutic. The former is based on both the Cartesian

belief that truth exists per se and the positivist belief that the subject can reasonably assess the

convergence of his mental representations3 to it through empirical testing.

The post-modern criticism has originated precisely from the confutation of this later belief.

The criticism ultimately maintains that the device positivists have conceived for excreting any

metaphysical residue from the scientific domain – i.e., empirical testing − is actually based it-

self on a metaphysical assumption: certain aspects that would be determinant in rejecting false

assertions can indeed be systematically ignored in making empirical tests because of a fallacy

in perceptive aptitudes (von Glasersfeld, 1980). From this point onward, truth becomes a con-

ventional entity, and the cognitive focus shifts from searching for it to examining the mental

processes by which subjects form their perceptual aptitudes.

The shift is particularly relevant as regards creativity because, while admitting that it stems

from the combination of existing elements in a new and useful way, combination can occur at

two different levels, depending on whether or not the reference set of elements includes the

cognitive code(s). Whilst in the ontological approach the combination concerns information

drawn from reality according to the best approximation to the true code the subject supposes

3 Purely to facilitate reading, the male is used to cover both genders.

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is at his disposal, in the hermeneutic approach creativity is conceived as the outcome of the

exposure of the subject’s own interpretative code to confrontation with other codes.

This entails, among other things, recourse to different sociologies of creativity. In the first

case, the subject creates ideas by establishing a relationship with ‘things’, maybe in a solipsis-

tic way, and society intervenes mainly by endowing him with a convenient cognitive code; by

contrast, in the second case social relationships play a crucial role, by providing the subject

with occasions for experiencing differences in cognitive codes. These diverse views are well

rendered by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), who make a distinction between Learning I,

“[which] is obtaining know-how in order to share specific problems based upon existing

premises”, and Learning II, “[which] is establishing new premises (i.e., paradigms, schemata,

mental models, or perspectives) to override the existing ones” (p. 44; emphasis added). The

next section is devoted to ascertaining how the Learning II paradigm has entered firms and

industry at large, as a core strategic activity.

2.2 The rise of the knowledge economy

Since the seminal work of Drucker (1968), and in general the demise of Fordism, it has been

admitted that the economy has left the industrial paradigm and entered a new one labelled the

‘knowledge economy’. Many interpretations continue to be given of the genesis, significance

and implications of this shift. The commonest one is that the event corresponds to the crossing

of a certain threshold in the formation of GDP or total employment by the knowledge-based

activities (OECD, 1996; Foray, 2000). This criterion is however a merely conventional one,

because recourse to the systematic application of codified knowledge to industry dates back to

the second industrial revolution. Labelling the crossing of that threshold as the entry into the

knowledge economy is undoubtedly licit, but it might be that in doing so, some deeper aspects

escape attention, and mainly that the notion of knowledge to which the knowledge-based ac-

tivities make recourse might no longer be the same notion of knowledge to which the conven-

tional approach makes reference when speaking about them.

In response to this question, we advance the hypothesis that the advent of the knowledge

economy consists in the deliberate internalisation of Learning II practices into firms and in-

dustry as a whole as a core strategic activity. To understand how that event could have oc-

curred, it is expedient to examine what has taken place within the communication circuits in-

side the firm with the advent of ICTs. Before then, communication necessarily required the

intervention of the human factor, since the monitoring of automatic devices, based as they

were on electro-mechanical technology, only worked in analogue mode, without any possibil-

ity of their being integrated into a complete monitoring system. The role of Humans was to

make communication possible at the firm level, by translating (in the double sense of inter-

preting and transferring) the signals that were emitted by the different local monitoring de-

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vices. However, this unavoidable human intervention meant that communication at whole was

pervaded by ambiguity, since individual interpretative codes are idiosyncratic. It becomes

clear why (a) most of the top management’s care was devoted to establishing detailed proto-

cols for minimising the ambiguity content within the communication circuits (Sennet, 2006),

and (b) the typical firm assembled all productive phases within the same plant, the factory: if

technical indivisibilities can explain the large dimension of plants, the proximity between

technically divisible parts and phases of the productive process satisfied the need both to re-

duce the decay of information and prevent free-riding within the communication circuits.

The advent of ICTs has wholly upset this scheme. The fact that it is now possible to fully in-

tegrate the peripheral monitoring devices into a single “syntactic”4 network thanks to the gen-

eralised recourse to digital language, has made the intervention of the human component in

the codified communication circuits superfluous. It follows that there has been an unprece-

dented disembedding of syntactic/‘monological’ communication circuits from the previously

single circuit, within which this kind of communication was inextricably entwined with the

human/‘dialogical’ communication. This material separation has entailed crucial conse-

quences inside firms and industry. Firstly, the closeness between the human factor and routine

activities was no longer necessary. Secondly, routine activities have become potentially foot-

loose, except when there are technical indivisibilities. The major consequence has however

consisted in the chance the firm has had to adopt Learning II practices, thus displacing its fo-

cus from the mechanical production of goods to the handling of those conditions that are suit-

able for generating “vision[s] to create something new” (Audretsch, Thurik, 1998, p. 23).

When Learning II is taken into consideration, the boundaries between firms and the socio-

cultural domain also become vague and more permeable: rather, they become a new action-

field for the firms themselves (Lash and Urry, 1994).

2.3 The city in the knowledge age

The disembedding of the monological communication from the intertwining with the dialogi-

cal circuits made possible by the advent of ICTs has revived the debate on the role of territo-

ries and the city in contemporary economies. According to the informational approach

adopted by some scholars, it was foretold that face-to-face contacts would become irrelevant,

and the city would lose its most distinctive agglomeration advantages, namely the facility to

gather information within a dense and dynamic relational context (Boden and Molotoch 1994;

Toffler, 1980; Pascal, 1987).

Other scholars subsequently argued that important agglomeration economies are at work also

within the informational paradigm, because of (a) the presence of significant indivisibilities

and scale economies within the circuits of codified information, which gives rise to networks

4 The term is drawn from Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995).

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and requires important infrastructures on nodes; (b) informational spillover concentrates on

such nodes; (c) these nodes themselves function as gateways between the various local places

and the global network within which the universally codified knowledge forms and flows. By

remarking too that this set of technological, informational, connecting and transcoding func-

tions entails recourse to a variety of highly skilled and highly waged workers, it is not diffi-

cult to conclude that the nodes in the space of flows not only tend to locate in the city, but

also give new substance and form to the city itself (Sassen,1991; Castells, 1996; Rullani,

2009).

However, this view of the pivotal role of the city within the globalised ICT-based economy

renders only one side of its new condition since it does not adequately consider the conse-

quences of the subsequent advent of the knowledge economy, as it has been described above.

Once this event is considered, the key driver for facilitating the access of local systems into

the global web and market is arising of socio-spatial structures that prove to be fit for enhanc-

ing aptitudes for knowledge-creation, that is for (a) recognising the heterogeneity in cognitive

codes, (b) handling them in order to facilitate (c) the generation of new relations between

things, agents and concepts, which is the very content of creativeness (Lane, Maxfield, 2005).

With reference to the meaning Durkheim (1895) originally gave to this kind of generative

structures, we name them ‘knowledge-creating milieus’ (KCM).

As regards the basic components and their relationships (spatial relationships included) for a

KCM to work, we can do no more here5 than merely to recall that: (a) it is made of two inter-

related devices, one of which generates ‘noise’, and the other, which is an intelligent device,

is inclined to view noise as the possible vector of underlying although unknown cognitive

codes, the access to which would allow to gain original insights into reality; (b) two main

ideal-types of KCM can be here identified, the dialogical milieu and the city. The first one is

based on the personal involvement of a small number of strongly motivated participants

which exchange opinions according to the practice of reciprocity, whereas the second one is a

“milieu of milieus” (Rémy, 2000), which is characterised by an impersonal production of be-

havioural and cultural spillover within a large number of structurally interdependent actors.

Focusing on the city, four further features seem particularly worthy of note:

a) the buzz or noise which spontaneously stems from a sufficiently large, dense and dynamic

social network is a public good (Storper, Venables, 2002), a trait which does not occur

within a dialogical context, except for the restricted club of participants;

b) this public good is destined to remain unexploited − and also to be viewed as a ‘bad’ − if

there are no competences able to translate it into information, and mainly information

about its generative code or codes;

c) translation entails recourse to a chain of highly specialised figures, the first and the last

links of which are respectively the emerging figures of the cool-hunter and the ‘post-

5 For a detailed analysis, see Cusinato (2012).

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modern’ entrepreneur. Between them, a number of other figures intervene, giving rise to

the so-called creative class: designers, engineers, psychologists, advertisers, publicists,

and many others, who have in common the ability to deal with interpretative codes6;

d) the cultural and professional aptitudes required for dealing with cognitive codes and the

fact that these aptitudes improve with interaction among insiders, cause the formation of

increasing barriers to the entry of competitors into an urban milieu (Camagni, 2007);

e) most of all, since the market is not the most suitable device for exchanging information

and still less for dialoguing, it becomes necessary to have recourse to other devices, firstly

reciprocation. It thus becomes possible to suggest that the internal relationships within an

urban KCM are based on a mix of competition and reciprocity, i.e. on the same ingredient

which is considered peculiar to IDs. As a consequence, the city in the knowledge age can

be viewed as a special kind of district: a ‘knowledge-creating district’.

In this way, the cultural contrast between the city and the neo-industrialised country would

appear as a heritage from the industrial past, since both now resort to the same composite in-

tegrative device − a mix of competition and cooperation −, although differences occur at least

on the functional ground, the city essentially being devoted to the generation of knowledge,

and the ID to the production of material goods. The new situation is depicted in figure 2,

where the internal relationships to the IDs and the city (not represented in the figure) as well

as the relationships between these two kinds of socio-spatial devices occur according to a mix

of market and moral rules, whereas the relationships with the external global market obey

market rules.

It is also noteworthy that in this situation the city becomes the main gateway for IDs to the

global market, because it offers functional services and competences to relate effectively with

foreign, rapidly changeable, highly competitive and often highly sophisticated ambiences, the

single ID cannot produce indoors (Rullani, 2009). The main challenge concerning the rela-

tionships between the IDs and the city in the knowledge economy thus becomes one of en-

hancing synergies between the two on the crucial terrain of Learning II7, beside the more

conventional although indispensable terrains on which the literature usually focuses (access to

the global web of flows, to a sophisticated final market, to research institutions and knowl-

edge-intensive services). Questions obviously arise about aptitudes and competences of both

parts for interacting between them − and together, with the external world − on the delicate

terrain of Learning II: are the ID actors culturally prepared to deal with the ‘noise’ of the city?

Symmetrically, are the urban KCS professionals competent in dialoguing with agents who

may be distrustful of the uncertain outcomes and surely destabilising nature of Learning II? In

the next two sections we shall describe in more detail the shift that has occurred in the rela-

tionships between the city and the industrialised countryside in Italy, consequent on the ad-

6 In the following pages, we shall call the activities related to Learning II as “Knowledge-creating Services”

(KCS). See Section 3.4. 7 Suggestions in this sense can be read in the final chapters of Becattini (2009).

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vent of the knowledge economy, and we shall also try to reply to the above questions in the

concluding section.

ID 1

ID 2ID iID i

ID n

IDs

The global market Market

exchanges

Market and

non-market

exchanges

The city as a

knowledge-

creating district

Market

exchanges

The local socio-

economic system

as a generative

milieu

Figure 2 − The topological structure of IDs in the knowledge age

3 New relationships between the city and the ‘countryside’ in the knowledge age

3.1 Fordism and the industrial city

Fordism is a mass production system based on standardised goods, produced with reduced

costs thanks to the scale economies deriving from the large dimensions of plants. Work is sci-

entifically organised through a rigid subdivision of tasks (manufacturing, planning, manage-

ment and enterprise ownership) inside vertically integrated structures.

One of the main peculiarities of the fordist paradigm is the asymmetry of power between the

decision-making units (single agents, firms, regions and nations), which manifests itself also

from a spatial standpoint, either between similar or very diverse decision-making units. Start-

ing from this conviction, Perroux (1950, 1955) develops the idea that spatial agglomerations

are a manifestation of power applied to geographical space. According to him, the economic

development concentrates upon a few growth poles that correspond to industrial agglomera-

tions where driving firms or driving sectors locate. Poles generate agglomeration economies

which trigger social and demographic polarisation processes, through Keynesian and Leonti-

evian multipliers.

During the last big phase of post-war industrialisation in the western countries, poles were

predominantly localised in industrialised urban centres, characterised by high growth rates

and intense technological, capital, labour and infrastructural concentrations. Unsurprisingly in

Italy, at the end of the 1960s, notwithstanding the use of the North-South dichotomy to ex-

plain the drastic imbalances of the national economy, this uneven development started to be

read according to the spatial metric of urban areas (Ruffolo, Barca, 1970). As a matter of fact,

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indeed, the urban gravitation process appeared only around a limited number of areas – the

industrial triangle of the cities of Milan, Turin and Genoa, and a few other industrial areas

such as Livorno and Florence. Avoiding regulating this trend could have led to the economic

and social desertification of wide areas and, at the same time, would have implied important

agglomeration diseconomies in the regions having major centripetal forces as Myrdal’s stud-

ies on cumulative circular causation had demonstrated (Myrdal, 1957).

Industrial urban centres seem therefore to be a crucial pillar of the fordist economy. In one re-

spect, they concentrate the necessary workforce for productive activity and represent the main

final market, involving employees as consumers. Conversely, they allow for the control of

deviance thanks to the rigidity of the productive organisation, which is reinforced by the ri-

gidity of urban planning, and to the fact that the fordist factory rules not only economic rela-

tionships, but also social ones. Rigidity has been one of the factors which have contributed to

the success of the fordist model and has been a factor on which its territorial outcome (the

great industrial urban centres) was grounded. At the same time it has been one of the most

important structural features to have contributed to its decline.

3.2 The age of Industrial Districts: escape from the city

In the early 1970s, Fordism was thrown into crisis due to a series of events, both conjunctural

and structural, which challenged two of its founding pillars: certainty and rigidity. The 1973

oil crisis occurred at a time when the mass goods market was saturated, the fixed exchange

rate regime was given up and the rigidities imposed by that model of production had become

a factor of friction, both in the productive and the socio-cultural domains. One of the territo-

rial outcomes of the crisis of Fordism has been the process of dis-urbanisation, which took the

form of an inversely correlated growth of dwellers and economic activities as opposed to ur-

ban dimension (Dematteis, 1997). In this period manufacturing activities, and mostly those

that are highly land-consuming and labour-intensive, were delocalised from metropolitan ar-

eas (Piemonte, Liguria, Lombardia) to peripheral areas of the North-western and North-

eastern regions (Garofoli, 1992).

The other phenomenon following the fall of Fordism was the exceptional endogenous devel-

opment of small and medium sized enterprises, mainly specialised in traditional sectors in the

NEC regions, in territorial contexts characterized by small and middle sized towns located in

the urbanised countryside. These small centres, each of which was endowed with an industrial

area, were also endowed with diversified urban functions, consolidated institutional elements,

a variety of private service activities and dense road networks (Fuà, Zacchia, 1983). Thanks to

a cultural climate reflecting the traditional values of family, devotion to work, saving propen-

sity and compliance with authority, the industrialisation processes in these regions did not

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create the classic labour/capital and centre/periphery oppositions, but gave origin to a kind of

morphological polycentrism.

The ID quickly became a metaphor of successful development, representing a local alternative

to the internationalisation of the corporate firm. Internationalisation and clusterisation do, in-

deed, represent two different ways through which economic systems have adjusted to the rise

of the production costs due to the oil crisis and the rigidity of the labour market. With interna-

tionalisation, the most routine phases linked to the manufacturing activities have been dis-

placed to developing or emerging countries, where firms draw heavily on the low cost of la-

bour, a relaxed control of negative environmental externalities linked to the productive proc-

ess and on a favourable fiscal regime. With the clustering of SMES, cost reductions came

from marshallian externalities and a curb on transaction costs. Proximity, face-to-face con-

tacts, mutual trust, small household-owned workshops and network relationships allowed en-

trepreneurs to adopt a vertically disintegrated model of production without having to face its

costs, which concern the price firms have to pay to buy goods and services on the market,

since they could count on reciprocal trust (Williamson, 1985). Even if, in this first phase of

industrialisation, the firms were not technological-innovation oriented, they could count on

recurrent competitive devaluations made by central government, which erased the delays ac-

cumulated in productivity, compared with the other European countries.

To sum up, from the point of view of territorial outcomes, it is possible to state that the city, a

pillar of the fordist model, was no longer central to IDs. Giorgio Fuà (1991) argued that

sprawling industrialisation in the Third Italy was possible thanks to the lack of an urban struc-

ture involving big cities. Polycentrism and localisation economies coming from the clustering

of SMEs seemed to be enough, at least till the 1980s, to make the ID model competitive on

the international scene.

3.3 ICTs and globalisation: back to the city

The internationalisation of western firms was accelerated by the developments of ICTs, as

well as new transport and logistic technologies. The new opportunities offered by the ICTs

triggered a debate on the relevance of proximity and, consequently, the role of territories and

the city in contemporary economies. Some scholars, on the basis that face-to-face contacts

might hypothetically become insignificant, stated that territory would implode in a homoge-

neous space, eroding the importance of proximity and agglomeration economies (Boden,

Molotoch 1994; Toffler, 1980; Pascal, 1987). Mitchell (1995) speaks expressly about a pro-

gressive shift from the Weberian city to “Bits City”, while Castells (1996) speaks of a “space

of flows”, a spatial organisation where agents, goods and information are in constant move-

ment within a globalised space.

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The reality is that all these contributions do not succeed in explaining why, notwithstanding

their forecasts, polarisation and concentration processes, like territorial disparities, continued.

As the most recent convergence studies show, at a sub-national level, territorial disparities are

constant among the block of 15 EU countries, in rapid growth among new members (Paas,

Schlittle, 2008), and increasing when shifting from the national and regional level to a sub-

regional level (Straubhaar et al., 2002). Moreover, Mora (2008) shows that disparities emerge

because of a growing sectorial specialisation and an increasing gap in human capital levels.

Empirical evidence also shows that cities are not disappearing, but rather reaffirm their cen-

trality in the globalised economy, where spatially dispersed activities are integrated at a plane-

tary level (Hospers, 2003).

If, after the fall of Fordism, the ID seemed to be suitable to the new productive needs, eco-

nomic globalisation requires however a further change of paradigm because SMEs clusters

are no longer able to provide the conditions for facing global competition. Nowadays, relative

prices have changed and thus competition increasingly requires the continual introduction of

process and product innovations, which ultimately are knowledge-based activities. In this new

condition, cities help by protecting against risk and uncertainty, allowing transaction costs to

be minimised through cognitive inputs, the variety of the labour market and of suppliers

(Camagni, 1993). The need for urbanisation economies − which concerns the concentration of

different and not interrelated economic activities, the sharing of transport infrastructure and

highly advanced services − induces firms to locate inside urban areas, generating geographi-

cal concentration of industries (real industrial urban sub-systems) quite similar to marshallian

districts (Amin, Graham, 1999).

Thanks to urban agglomeration economies, a lot of cities reversed the process of manufactur-

ing decline during the 1980s (Storper, 1996). On the one hand, the globalisation process per-

mits the delocalisation of productive activities but, on the other hand, it requires concentration

of leading and controlling activities of large multinational firms and global financial centres

(Sassen, 1991). Indeed, if routine activities (which typically rest on syntactic communication)

do not need peculiar localisation, knowledge-based activities (which rest on dialogical com-

munication) show a peculiar localisation rationale, which seems to prefer urban contexts.

As regards the Italian case, the peculiarities of the process of tertiarising the economy have

emerged since the 1980s. Many manufacturing firms began to outsource a lot of activities that

were core activity-related, such as book-keeping, logistics, maintenance, legal activities, mar-

keting, cleaning activities and staff training. As a result, service activities, previously carried

out inside firms, became autonomous enterprises and, consequently, their employees, who

were previously considered to work within the manufacturing sector, are now counted within

the service sector (Gallino, 2003). Since, between the ’80s and the new millennium a substan-

13

tial share of the increase in service sector jobs8 was due to this phenomenon, it is possible to

state that a large part of the Italian tertiarisation process is deeply interrelated with the manu-

facturing sector, which remains the driving force of the national economy9.

The outcomes of this process have been highly spatially concentrated (Calafati 2009). Private

services − in addition to public ones – have polarised within the urban systems, that is to say a

cluster of functionally integrated municipalities, organised around medium to big-sized towns.

Choosing a central location allows them to take advantage of both a barycentric position and

urban agglomeration economies. For instance, the analysis of the spatial distribution of em-

ployees in Italian provincial capitals (which are big or medium-sized cities) shows the polari-

sation of certain tertiary sectors, like ‘real estate, renting and business activities, consulting

sector’ and ‘financial intermediation’: in 2001, their share in provincial capitals was, respec-

tively, 57.8% and 60.9% out of total national employment in these sectors, while the provin-

cial share was just 38.9% out of total national employment.

3.4 Knowledge-creating Services and the city

Scholars from different fields have provided different explanations of the features that make

the city a suitable place for activities related to knowledge creation and innovation. According

to Jacobs (1969), the mixité of economic activities and the socio-cultural heterogeneity of in-

habitants are the most suitable conditions for the creation, transmission and re-shaping of

knowledge. Cities are characterised by a continuous internal and external interaction which

permits individuals and organisations uninterruptedly to process ‘signals’ and ‘impulses’,

generating and spreading knowledge, enhancing the productivity and professionalism of em-

ployees and entrepreneurs. As a result, urban contexts can count on a ceaseless process of

human capital enrichment that allows rapid technological change.

The neoclassical perspective suggests the importance of certain features that make the city

particularly attractive for highly skilled workers (young people with a high level of education

and income), such as consumer-oriented services, urban and climatic amenities, wage-

enhancing opportunities and quality of life (Glaeser 2005). Florida (2002), for his part, fo-

cuses on the importance of tolerant contexts with a high quality of life that attract creative

classes to congregate. To intercept this kind of workers, firms elect the same localisation for

their plants, triggering a process of cumulative causation.

But the story is perhaps much richer. Storper and Scott (2009) stress the relevance “of selec-

tive geographical matching of productive resources, skills and institutions of coordination”,

8 The real estate, renting and business activities consulting sector had 650,000 employees in 1981; the number

rose to 1.2 million in 1991, and to 2.3 million in 2001.

9 In 1991, 2001 and 2007 manufacturing employees accounted, respectively, for 29.1%, 25.3% and 25.3% of

the total employed workforce.

14

which would jointly be able to explain the basic source of urban dynamism. Applying these

statements to the Italian case, interesting stylized facts emerge:

a) as previously described, the tertiarisation process which has occurred since the ’80s is

deeply interrelated with the manufacturing sector;

b) the spatial outcome of that tertiarisation process has been the concentration of services,

and particularly knowledge-creating services, in urban areas;

c) a sort of division of labour between urban areas and IDs has also emerged. As in a mod-

ern version of the Weber theory on the localisation of industrial activities, cities furnish

knowledge, creativity and innovation, which represent now basic raw materials and stra-

tegic assets for the ID-based manufacturing sector;

d) cities work as gate-keepers (Morrison, 2008), being the interface between the local and

the global level. They allow IDs to build relational networks out of their local context,

expanding their operative “boundaries” (IRSO, 2010). In this perspective, the interlinking

of IDs and urban systems seems to be crucial if processes of endogenous development are

to be sustained and global competitiveness faced (Rullani, 2009);

e) the possibility of establishing and improving such a link is closely related to the so-called

industrial commons such as universities, the financial system, research and advanced ser-

vices poles, high-tech know-how (Pisano, Shih, 2009);

f) urban marketing policies and targeted negotiations are essential to attract knowledge-

based and most innovative activities, and have cumulative effects thanks to the mecha-

nism of endogenous development (Calafati, 2009);

g) the focus on the city and urban policies has become a major element of the political

agenda from the 1990s onwards. Cities and their actors are more and more often being

considered as the main lever-points for regional and national growth, responsible for so-

cial cohesion, and an important device to cope with global competition through knowl-

edge.

With reference to the view of the knowledge economy we have developed here above, it be-

comes worth examining the inter-link which exists (or could form) between the city and IDs,

with reference to the crucial domain of Learning II, that is the capabilities of dealing with

cognitive codes. By labelling as ‘Knowledge-creating Services’ (KCS) those economic ser-

vices which are expressly devoted to Learning II, we argue that they prefer to cluster (a) in

the city, in order to take advantage of the generalised ‘buzz’ that forms, not only within their

somewhat closed circles, but in the wider urban arena, and specifically, and (b) in cities that

are placed, often even if not always, near IDs or within industrial milieus. The next section is

devoted to exploring these hypotheses.

15

4 A geography of Knowledge-creating Services in Italy

Our approach to KCS differs from both the KIBS (Miles et al., 1995) and the Creative Indus-

try (DCMS, 2001) approaches. It differs from the former because it does not take into consid-

eration those services that, although they have a high technological content, mainly make ap-

plicative use of existing knowledge, such as “Data processing”, “Database activities”, “Main-

tenance and repair of offices, accounting and computing machinery”. By contrast, KCS in-

clude “Media” as well as other public activities, such as “Universities and Research Centres”,

that are not recorded among KIBS. On the other hand, KCS differ from Creative Industry

classification because they do not encompass the entire creative chain (from the inventive

conception and design to the manufacturing production and retail) but only the primary com-

ponents of this chain, which are inherently concerned with Learning II.

4.1 Methodological aspects

Before gaining an insight into the geography of KCS in Italy, let us define the spatial unit of

analysis, the economic categories we will focus on, and the index we will make use of to de-

scribe them. As far as the spatial unit is concerned, the choice has fallen on Local Labour Sys-

tems (LLSs) (Barbieri, Causi, 2005). They are defined as clusters of contiguous municipalities

which are aggregated on the basis of labour commuting flows. LLSs, nowadays, are the only

spatial metric in Italy that conveys functional territorial relationships. Concerning the classifi-

cation of economic activities, we propose an original classification, in accordance with the

Learning II approach described in section 2. As shown in Table 1, three sub-groups have been

distinguished among KCS:

1. Core KCS, whose normal activity, which is readable in the Ateco definition, consists in

handling interpretative codes. Within this group, a further divide is made between Private-

Core KCS and Public-Core KCS, depending on the respective services are tradable or not;

2. Core-Related KCS, which concern those activities that normally interact with interpreta-

tive codes, although this is not explicitly readable in the Ateco definition.

Data are drawn from the Italian 2001 Industrial Census. Intersections between the three kinds

of classification (KIBS, CI and KCS) are shown in Figure 3.

The last methodological aspect regards the choice of the localisation index, to map the geog-

raphy of KCS. Even if the literature makes quite commonly use of the Localisation Quotient,

which relates employees in a certain sector to total employment (Boix, Galletto, 2005; Istat,

2006), we shall make use of a Density Localisation Quotient (DLQ), which relates KCS em-

ployees to total dwellers of the LLS. This makes possible to monitor two relevant aspects:

firstly, the relative importance of each economic activity, not in respect to total employment

(which can be a very low figure), but the demographic size of the LLS and, secondly, the presence

16

Table 1 − Classification of Knowledge-Creating Services

Source: Our elaboration of Istat classification of economic activities (Ateco 1991)

Figure 3 − The three main classifications of knowledge-based economic activities

Ateco cod. Private Core KCS Ateco cod. Core Related KCS

22110 Publishing of books 22150 Other publishing

22120 Publishing of newspapers 72100 Hardware consultancy

22130 Publishing of journals and periodicals 74141 Financial consultancy

22140 Publishing of sound recordings 74142 Labour consultancy

72200 Software consultancy and supply 74143 Agrarian consultancy

72601 Telematic, robotics, eidomatic activities 74144 Business and management consultancy activities

72602 Other computer related activities 74145 Public relations

73100Research and experimental development on natural

sciences and engineering74146 Commercial information agency activities

73200Research and experimental development on social

sciences and humanities74150 Management activities of holding companies

74111 Legal activities 74203 Integrated Engineering activities

74130 Market research and public opinion polling 74204 Aerial photogrammetry and cartography activities

74201 Architectural activities 74205 Minining research activities

74202 Engineering activities 74811 Photographic activities

74401 Advertising 92200 Radio and television activities

74845 Designers 92310 Artistic and literary creation and interpretation

92110 Motion picture and video production 92400 News agency activities

Ateco cod. Public Core KCS

92510 Library and archives activities 80303 Other higher education

80301 Higher education-3 years bachelor 85114 University hospitals

80302 Higher education-5 years bachelor 92520Museums activities and preservation of historical sites

and buildings

17

of structural differences between the labour markets of Northern and Southern Italy. The lat-

ter, indeed, suffers from high rates of unemployment and inactivity. The index is calculated as

follows:

D

ED

E

DLQK

i

ik ,

=

where Ek,i is the amount of KCS employees in the LLS i, Di the amount of inhabitants of LLS

i, Ek the amount of KCS employees in Italy, and D the amount of inhabitants in Italy.

4.2 Cities, manufacturing sector and KCS

The KCS sector employed more than 1.1 million people in 2001 (they were about 750,000 in

1991), equal to 5.7% of total Italian employment. Table 2 shows that more than half of them

belong to Private-Core KCS. This is the most distinguishing subclass of KCS, which contrib-

uted more significantly to the increase of the total KCS sector between 1991 and 2001. On the

contrary, the Public-Core KCS sector with about 181,000 employees, is the smallest in job

terms. The Core-Related KCS sector, finally, employed about 250,000 workers and, like Pub-

lic-Core KCS, was less dynamic between 1991 and 2001.

Table 2 − Number of employees in KCS, KIBS and CI sectors, in 1991 and 2001

Source: Our elaboration of Industry and Services Census, Istat 1991, 2001

As for the other classifications, total employment recorded for KIBS activities is higher than

that of KCS (and the difference has widened between the two Censuses). CI employees, are

more than the double compared to KCS employees (several manufacturing and retail activities

are included), but their sector is also the most static on the temporal point of view.

The computation of the DLQ referred to KCS leads to the identification of 34 LLSs out of the

total 686, with a considerable share of Private-Core KCS employees. Their further subdivi-

sion into three classes – namely, low (1<DLQ≤1.2), medium (1.2<DLQ≤1.5) and high

(DLQ>1.5) − gives three groups of respectively 11, 10 and 13 LLSs. A glance at the geogra-

phy of Private-Core KCS (Chart 1) allows us to highlight some stylised facts. The first is that

the evolutionary potential of KCS is localised particularly in Northern Italy10

, where 8 out of 10

Of LLSs characterised by a substantial presence of Private-Core KCS, 21 are localised in Northern Italy, 8 in Central Italy and 5 in Southern Italy. Among the LLSs of Southern Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia) the only urban system with a medium value of DLQ, is Bari.

Years Private Core KCS Public Core KCS Core Related-KCS Total KCS KIBS CI-DCMS

1991 387.876 134.127 225.696 747.699 892.902 1.870.047

2001 671.830 181.379 251.677 1.104.886 1.623.934 1.854.539

18

the 11 LLSs with DLQ >1.5 lie. As a consequence, and because of the importance of KCS in

relation to local economic development trajectories, the existing disparities between Northern

and Southern Italy will, probably, exacerbate in the coming years.

The second stylised fact is that Private-Core KCS is an urban phenomenon: of the 34 LLSs

with DLQ>1, 31 contain a provincial or regional capital; the LLSs with DLQ>1.5 include the

two largest Italian metropolitan areas (Milan and Rome), plus Turin, Bologna, Florence and

Padua, each of which has more than 500,000 inhabitants. Of the remaining five LLSs, three

include provincial capitals (Trento, Pisa and Parma); Mezzolombardo is integrated with

Trento, and Ivrea, which is close to Turin, has a peculiar history depending on the presence of

Olivetti (a computer science-based firm).

Chart 1 − LLSs with DLQ>1 in Private Core

KCS11

Chart 2 − LLSs with DLQ>1 in Public-Core KCS

With regard to Public-Core KCS (Chart 2), we observe different patterns of localisation.

These services are more homogeneously distributed throughout Italy, due to the fact that their

localisation reflects more institutional than market factors. It is for this reason that they

mainly overlap with the LLSs which host provincial capitals, where most universities and

university hospitals are also located. In this case too, LLSs hosting cities are the most repre-

sented. Only 8 LLSs out of the 49 total specialised in Public-Core KCS are not provincial

capitals.

11

The scale of grey denotes the DLQ degree. Light, medium and dark grey is respectively for low, medium and

high density of KCS.

19

As for the pattern of localisation of Core-Related KCS (Chart 3), it seems to be intermediate

between Public-Core and Private-Core KCS – a little bit more sprawled than Private-Core

KCS, but preferably located in Northern and Central Italy. Core-Related KCS are the least

knowledge-intensive category among the three identified. According to expectations, also

their urban characterisation is less evident. Of the 53 LLSs with DLQ>1, 22 LLSs do not in-

clude provincial capitals, but small-medium sized towns (in 15 cases they have fewer than

50,000 inhabitants). Finally, if we consider KCS as a whole (Chart 4), the urban feature

emerges again. Just 2 LLSs out of 41 do not include provincial capitals, which is the greatest

level of ‘urbanity’ among the considered typologies of KCS.

Chart 3 − LLSs with DLQ>1 in Core-Related

KCS

Chart 4 − LLSs with DLQ>1 in total KCS

Chart 5 finally shows that there is a complementary specialisation between LLSs specialised

in KCS and IDs. The map shows the intersection between the 34 LLSs specialised in Private-

Core KCS and the IDs as identified by Istat (Istat, 2006). The number of spatial intersections

amount to only 6 cases12

. This seems to strengthen the hypothesis we made in paragraph 3.3,

according to which KCS are strongly related to urban contexts which, in turn, are character-

ised by a structure of the manufacturing industry that is quite different with respect to IDs.

The former, indeed, is more heterogeneous in terms of scale, making possible the localisation

of large firms, while the latter is composed of small and medium-sized enterprises, specialised

in the “made in Italy” sector (Becattini, 1998). As a consequence, we can state that the IDs are

12

San Severino Marche, Vicenza, Brescia, Teramo, Modena, Urbino.

20

generally peripheral with respect to the major urban systems, and that they might ‘depend on’

them for the supply of KCS.

Chart 5 − Intersection between LLSs specialised in Private-Core KCS and IDs13

A last confirmation about the spatial concentration of KCS comes from Table 3. All the speci-

fications of the Gini Index (not weighted, weighted for LLS population or area) show that

KCS as a whole and their three subclasses are much more concentrated than population, total

manufacturing and KIBS.

Table 3 − Gini Index of population and employment in KCS, KIBS and Manufacturing, 2001

Source: Our elaboration of Industry and Services Census, Istat, 2001

13

Grey is for LLSs taxonomised by Istat as Industrial Districts; white with black borders for LLSs with DLQ>1

referred to Private-Core KCS; grey with black borders for the intersection between the two previous categories.

Gini Index weighted on population Gini Index weighted on area Gini Index not weighted

Population 0,71620077 Population 0,66072349Private Core KCS 0,83736765 Private Core KCS 0,89266936 Private Core KCS 0,85857788

Public Core KCS 0,82305058 Public Core KCS 0,92474896 Public Core KCS 0,93695779

Core-Related KCS 0,84243677 Core-Related KCS 0,88376907 Core-Related KCS 0,8429632

KCS 0,82874238 KCS 0,89213551 KCS 0,86241212

KIBS 0,81054145 KIBS 0,85036432 KIBS 0,81775958

Manufacturing 0,70238004 Manufacturing 0,74104941 Manufacturing 0,75376096Total employment 0,73877999 Total employment 0,76408313 Total employment 0,72334867

21

5 Conclusions

Learning I and Learning II are two cognitive modalities that are so closely intertwined as to

be almost undistinguishable from each other in everyone’s daily praxis. Although individuals

think they are making predominantly if not exclusive recourse to Learning I, they are actually

carrying on a ceaseless shuttle between the two modalities, thus continuously reshaping,

maybe unconsciously, their own cognitive code. The belief that Learning I is the normal route

to knowledge has however permeated modern civilisation: the separation between mind and

nature and the need for ‘clear and distinct’ ideas in order to dominate both nature and society

(and maybe the mind itself), have relegated Learning II to the so-called pre-analytical

(Schumpeter) or metaphysical (Popper) domain, that is away from the properly scientific one.

In turn, the mechanical rigidity inherent in the industrial paradigm, and chiefly Fordism, the

need it had for an unambiguous command-and-control chain (Sennet, 2006), made Learning I

the normative approach to knowledge and, à cascade, to innovation within firms.

The ICT revolution, with the disembedment of monological communication circuits from the

intertwining with the dialogical circuits to which it has given rise, has made it possible to real-

ise the higher generative potentialities of Learning II and, as a consequence, the key impor-

tance of dealing with information about cognitive codes rather than (or besides) information

about the external world. On a spatial view, the focus therefore shifts to the socio-spatial de-

vices − milieus − that are reputed to enhance aptitudes for Learning II. The firm and the city

have already been indicated as knowledge-creating milieus, and are under examination by

number of scholars. The question arises if the territory too can work and be governed (in the

sense of governance) as a knowledge-creating milieu. As regards this concern, the above

analysis suggests that the changing relationships between IDs and the city over time provide

the appropriate frame (or merely a metaphor?) for supporting such a hypothesis. After a pe-

riod − approximately from the late Sixties to the early Nineties of the past century − which

was characterised (in Italy, at least) by the rise of IDs, and during which these socio-territorial

formations were interpreted as an alternative pattern to development with respect to the ford-

ist city, the time has perhaps arrived to question if this image is still consistent with the socio-

economic, cultural and spatial conditions consequent on the advent of ICTs and the rise of the

knowledge paradigm.

On this prospect, the relationship between IDs and the city seems to provide the basic ele-

ments for a ‘territorial’ knowledge-creating milieu to emerge. On the one hand, the contempo-

rary city works as a ‘heterogenetic’ device, in the sense it is the main generator of heterogene-

ity, heterodoxy and also noise. On the other hand, the ID is by its very nature an ‘orthoge-

22

netic’ device14

, the mission of which is to turn disorder (raw and dispersed materials, includ-

ing information) into order (innovation and goods). The other necessary condition for the sys-

tem effectively to work as a knowledge-creating milieu is the presence of a ‘mechanism’ al-

lowing the disorder produced by the city, firstly, to be interpreted as a potential resource − a

sort of informational raw material − and then possibly converted into genuinely new informa-

tion through recourse to Learning II.

This requires that a dynamic congruence is established (and governed) between the city’s ca-

pacities to generate ‘noise’ and the ID’s abilities to interpret it as a potential vector of innova-

tion. If the city does not produce ‘noise’ in opportune quantity (not too much, respect to the

capacities of processing it, and not too little, as is likely to happen in cases of extreme and un-

differentiated urban sprawl), or does not catch, recode and transmit the ‘noise’ coming from

outside, the local milieu can decay for an excess or a lack of raw material (informational im-

pulses) input. On the other side, if there is a lack of Learning II aptitudes within the ID, it is

doomed to become isolated from the main source of information about cognitive codes and/or

succumb because of a relative excess of noise. It seems therefore that the key concern is that

the local actors − policy makers, urban and ID entrepreneurs, professionals of KCS, educa-

tional and cultural institutions − meet to (a) ascertain if the basic elements are there for a terri-

torial knowledge-creating milieu to become established and work and, if they are, (b) start a

strategy for establishing a congruence between the generative capacities of the city and the in-

terpretative capacities of ID(s), and finally, (c) improve the performance of the milieu over

time, by acting to enhance both the capacities of the urban fabric for generating unexpected

novelties, and those of the IDs for converting them into innovation opportunities.

These conclusions obviously detract nothing from other conventional strategies that are more

directly connected to the Learning I approach, because of the interaction between the two

modalities of learning we have discussed above.

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